on the Muppets

notes on nineties romanticism

Recently I saw The Muppet Christmas Carol for the first time. It was among the first times I’d seen The Muppets, period. I hadn’t grown up watching The Muppet Show; I’d seen virtually none of the films; I had a vague sense only that they were connected, somehow, to Sesame Street, which I’d also managed to largely avoid. 

I loved it. I didn’t just love it in some detached, ironic way. I loved it whole-heartedly, full-throatedly, in the way I love Metropolitan and When Harry Met Sally and Frasier. I cried at least twice.

It wasn’t just that it’s a Christmas story – although the Dickens tale is largely played beautifully straight: Michael Caine plays Scrooge with all the gravitas of a Royal Shakespeare Company lead; most of the supporting cast consists of Muppets. Nor was it, just, that the lyrics – did I mention it’s a musical? – are painfully serious: meditations on the way we train ourselves into sin and wickedness, how the very things that shackle us come out of what we choose. (But there's nothing in nature that freezes your heart / Like years of bein' alone / It paints you with indifference / Like a lady paints with rouge). Nor was it, exactly, the technological artistry of the Muppets themselves: chaotic vaudevillian puppets that human beings have imbued with far more life, somehow, than any analogous CGI. 

Rather, The Muppet Christmas Carol works as well as it does, as a movie, precisely because of its moral universe: a vision of both earnestness and deeply human goodness that links the Victorian Christianity of Dickens to the unheralded efforts of the Muppets’ invisible puppeteers: we are all messy, self-destructive human beings, who in our desire to communicate something of ourselves to one another might be able to lift ourselves out of our solitude.

“Marley’s Ghost” by John Leech, an original illustration from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843)

For almost a year now, I’ve been wrestling with an incipient essay on why I love movies like Metropolitan and When Harry Met Sally and, now, The Muppet Christmas Carol so much. It’s bound up, intimately, not just with a moral vision but a specifically temporal one: something I’d like to call nineties romanticism. (Metropolitan came out in 1990, The Muppet Christmas Carol in 1992, When Harry Met Sally in, close enough, 1989; Frasier ran from 1993 to 2004.) Not every film, or even every family-friendly film, made in or around the nineties fits in this category, of course. But it’s possible to see, for example, a shared vision of human life that unites Frasier, say, to The Princess Bride (1987), the Winona Ryder Little Women (1994), Moonstruck (1987), and Crossing Delancey (1988; a sort of Jewish Moonstruck, starring Amy Irving instead of Cher). 

It is a particular aesthetic, as well as a particular political and ethical stance: a fundamentally optimistic (and perhaps, by today’s standards, perilously cringe) vision of what it means to be human: at once clear-eyed about personal flaws and failures and committed to the idea that resolving these flaws and failures must happen through distinctly human encounters with people (and sometimes Muppets) as flawed as we are. Nineties romanticism upholds, rather than dispenses with, meta-narratives, even as it tweaks them to give us a closer look at the characters involved.

Think, for example, of a paradigmatic Nineties Romantic film: Ever After (1998), a non-supernatural retelling of the Cinderella story (the role of the fairy godmother is played, essentially, by Leonardo Da Vinci) in which our Cinderella, Danielle de Barbarac (Drew Barrymore), wins the heart of the Prince (Dougray Scott) by quoting Thomas More’s Utopia at him. The plot architecture of Cinderella – mistaken identity, a grand dramatic ball – is all there; but the emotional architecture of the story revolves around the fact that Cinderella (in disguise for reasons that do not bear much scrutiny) and the Prince fall genuinely in love long before the ball scene, challenging one another to think more seriously about the world around them (and, in the Prince’s case, about the responsibility he has to his citizens). If there’s any “subversion” here, it is in the reimagining of fabled fairy-tale lovers as human beings.

Fundamentally, however, the story is a fairy tale: the characters do end up living happily ever after (or, in the case of the wicked stepmother, fairly punished for their misdeeds). True love does exist. Goodness, kindness, moral virtue, can lead us to a better world than the one we started out in. Evil exists, to be sure, but even villains get to be human: Anjelica Huston’s performance as the stepmother – where she gets to confess her jealousy of the stepdaughter who she sees a rival for her beloved late husband’s heart – is one of its standouts. Often, as in the case of the Muppets’ Scrooge, villainy comes not from humanity as such but a conscious refusal to open up one’s humanity to other people. Fear: of loneliness, of rejection, of loss, calcifies into cruelty. But everyone – more often than not – has a chance at redemption, whether or not they are able to take it.

It is precisely this combination of playful affection for classic narratives and the desire to relocate the emotional heart of those narratives from plot-structure (as in, say, some of the more baroque screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s to which they pay homage, where people fall in love when the script says they will) to human interpersonal messiness (think, for example, of Harry and Sally falling in love in When Harry Met Sally) that, for me, characterize the best of nineties romanticism. Unlike later 2000s-era and contemporary films, which so often operate with a gleeful disdain for the fairy tales they fracture, and a self-consciously teenage propensity for eye-rolling snark, films in the nineties romantic oeuvre don’t care if you think they’re a little silly, a little embarrassing, a little too earnest. The Princess Bride makes this trope explicit: most of the film is narrated by a grandfather to his too-cool-for-school tween, who slowly finds himself drawn into the romance against his will. 

It’s of course possible to just read this sense of optimism as merely a historical fact about the nineties: poised between the Greed-is-Good excess of the 1980s and the disillusionment of the post-9/11 age. But I think to dismiss nineties romanticism as merely a fact about the nineties is to dismiss much of what made life in the nineties (at least, in the USA) worth being optimistic about: the combination of (relative) political and economic stability with technological promise that hadn’t yet revealed its shadow-side: think beepers and flip phones, not TikTok and Instagram. Its very moderation, compared to today’s technological culture at least, is all the more moving because of its anachronism: there’s something bittersweet in watching, say, Roz on Frasier try out email for the first time, even as she sometimes drops by Frasier’s apartment unannounced because that was the sort of thing a person in the 1990s might do. Nineties romanticism hits all the harder because of how close that world is to our own; and how abyssal is the chasm that separates us. 

Nowhere is that more evident to me than watching the artistry of the Muppets themselves. These silly, funny little puppets, operated by artists who know how to make them seem alive, are somehow more moving, more real-seeming, than anything that could be produced with computer special effects. They are, in their own way, the apex of a technological shift: as good as you can get without CGI. 

And it is precisely in their aliveness that the Muppets challenge us to think more clearly about what art, itself, is for. They don’t look real, in the sense that they don’t look like photo-realistic animals (or even like imagined animals in the universe they occupy). They do not “reflect reality” in any kind of imitative way. What they do, rather, is express human emotions, human hungers, human needs and fears and longings and loves: revealing, rather than representing. They say something about being human, and about what it feels like and looks like and sounds like to be a human being trying to wrestle with a complicated idea or a feeling (even if that feeling is, say, really wanting to eat cookies). And, in so doing, they are able to convey far more of reality than their successors.

It would be reductionist, probably, to say that things were better before the Internet, or that the pursuit of technologically-enabled hyper-realistic simulacra has made us less capable of apprehending reality than we were in the era of Muppets and flip-phones. But I’m not sure that it would be wrong, either. Whenever I find myself rewatching Nineties Romantic films, I find myself longing not just for their moral vision, but their sense of moderation: a faith in grand narratives that still allows room for the dignity of the human individual; optimism about human potential that rarely tends towards Prometheanism; a belief that the world could be a better place if we only saw one another a little more clearly, and learned to love one another more. Watching them, I even let myself believe it.

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